Tag Archives: projection

Digital Projection: ‘The Barber Collective‘ are aged 16–21 and meet twice a month to re-interpret The Barber Institute of Fine Art’s collection. Visit Old Joe to see the result of the collective’s artistic reimagining process, in collaboration with digital artist Antonio Roberts.

A day of panel talks and performances about VJing, live cinema and audio-visual performance. This symposium will bring together academics, artists and VJs to discuss the role of projection in their work, and the current state of AV performance in the UK. A number of thematically focussed panel talks will take place in Centrala, Birmingham on Saturday 24th February, followed by an evening of AV performances from 7pm – 10pm, and ending with a VJ Jam until late. Running in parallel at Vivid Projects there will be a number of projection-based installations. This event is a collaboration between The Projection Project, an AHRC funded research project based at the University of Warwick, and Lighttouch Festival.

Join us for an innovative programme of free events, installations and special performances and celebrate the creativity of Jean-Michel Basquiat

Too Young for What? provides opportunities to develop young people’s creativity and showcases a range of new work with and by young people from across east London and beyond. The day explores what Basquiat and his practice means to young and emerging artists through a range of art forms including music, performance, street art and poetry.

From 7-10th September I was invited to take part in the Uncanny Valley event in Burbage Valley, Derbyshire. It’s a lovely place! The event was described as:

A two day hack in the rugged Burbage Valley in the Peak District, hacking in nature, exploring the role of sensors and data in responding to the environment. In collaboration with Lovebytes.

Responding to the environment was probably the biggest hack of the event! Aside om the midges, the gargantuan hills, the cold and the lack of wifi, the biggest challenge that faced us was the lack of electricity. Jon Harisson of Lovebytes was smart enough to bring a battery pack, but with a running time of two hours this placed restraints of what was achievable.

I can’t speak for the other participants but I felt this restriction affected me greatly. As a mostly visual and projection artist my usual setup consists of a laptop and a projector. Software for manipulating visuals (Pure Data, Processing etc) usually consumes more power than running audio software. In addition to this the biggest power drain of them all was the projector. Really inexpensive projectors and battery powered projectors exist but these would never have enough lumens to fill a space as big as the Burbage Valley. Rather than accept defeat I worked to respond to the environment. My situation – 2 hour battery, small projector, working in daylight daylight – meant I could only get any noticeable effects if I scaled down. And scale down is what I did!

The above pictures were made by simply pointing the Glass video piece onto small rocks and twigs. This was all during daylight, so I was quite surprised by how vibrant the colours were. Jon Harrison quite handily shot a video (edited by me)

This kind of experimentation piqued my interest. I could go down the route of projection mapping but I’ll resist for now. I’m less interested in mapping flat video footage to uneven surfaces and more interested in seeing how uneven surfaces affects both the surface and the video.

Antonio Roberts
with Rachel Sweeney
16th May, 2014
9pm – 10.30pm
Ropewalks Square, FACT, Liverpool
Glitch artist Antonio Roberts presents a new aspect to his work exploring error, working in tandem with butoh inflected dance performed by Rachel Sweeney. Computer interface, digital image, human body and choreography are drawn into beautiful maelstrom of system error. The public are invited to join in and excert their own influence over this unwieldy system for control.

Commissioned by Mercy and Hive as part of the Syndrome programme.
In partnership with FACT, as part of Light Night 2014
@syn_dro_me ** http://syn-dro.me

BYOB Birmingham happened on Friday 16th March and it was a great success! For those who like statistics, in the end the event had 18 artists (plus videos from VIVID’s archives), 22 beamers, and nearly 200 people attend.

My thanks for making the night awesome go to:

Flatpack Festival, which has been going for six years, for putting on a great festival and allowing BYOB to be part of it

VIVID, whose amazing gallery space was perfectly suited for this event. There were worries about there being too many cables and causing a power outage due to too many beamers, but the excellent VIVID staff were on hand to make sure it all went swimmingly

Bobby Bird from Modulate and Gary Judge (aka Arcade) for providing awesome music throughout the night. Many times I received comments about how well the music matched the event. Also, Cylob FTW!

Shelly Knotts, for being helping me on the day, taking photos, keeping me sane, and for buying me lunch 😉

Rafaël Rozendaal, for coming up with the BYOB idea and allowing anyone to do as they wish with it

The people of Birmingham and West Midlands, for coming out in your hundreds to support the event

And last, but not least, my thanks go to all of the artists that traveled from all over the country to be part of BYOB Birmingham!

If any of my readers took any gifs, photos or videos (even phone quality is great) upload them to Flickr/Youtube/Vimeo and tag them “BYOB Birmingham” or send them to byobbirmingham@gmail.com and, with your permission, they’ll be used in a video documenting the event.